Tudor Queens of England
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Somewhat more visible is her involvement in the matrimonial fortunes of her siblings and children. Her sister Cecily, the closest to her in age, was married at some date between 25 November 1487 (when she bore the Queen’s train) and 1
June 1488, to John, Viscount Welles, who was the King’s uncle of the half blood (he was an illegitimate brother of Jasper Tudor, the King’s full uncle). John had been involved in Buckingham’s rebellion in 1483, and had escaped to join Henry in Britanny. He was recognized as Baron Welles when his attainder was reversed in 1485 and he was created Viscount in the summer of 1487. He received several substantial grants from the Crown and his marriage to Cecily was obviously part of his general build up. He died on 9 February 1498 leaving only a daughter, Ann, who died shortly after her father. Cecily remarried in 1503, after her sister was dead. Anne, her next surviving sister, was married on 4 February 1495 to Thomas Howard junior, son and heir of the Earl of Surrey. Thomas was to be a great man under Henry VIII, succeeding his father as Duke of Norfolk in 1524, but Anne did not live to be Duchess of Norfolk, dying in 1511. They had no children who survived. Catherine, the next eldest, was married in October of the same year to Sir William Courtenay, who was to be created Earl of Devon in 1511 and who died about a month later. Their son, Henry, created Marquis of Exeter in 1525, eventually paid for his Plantagenant blood with his head, being executed by Henry VIII in 1538. Catherine died in 1517. Elizabeth’s youngest sibling, Bridget, took the veil at Dartford at some time before 1500 but whether this was by choice or because the Queen failed to fi nd a suitable husband for her is not clear. All these marriages were offi cially provided by the King, and in the case of Viscount Welles that was obviously so, but it would have been normal practice for the Queen to act as broker, particularly in obtaining the consent of her sisters to whom, as we have seen, she was very close. There are a few hints and suggestions in the records that this was the case, although specifi c evidence is scarce. Only one of her own children was married in her lifetime and for that little more than her consent was required. Almost from the moment of his accession, Henry had been keen on the idea of an alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, not least because he foresaw trouble with France over the Duchy of Britanny. Duke Francis II died on 9 September 1488, leaving his young daughter Anne as his heir and at the mercy of Charles VIII of France. On 10 February 1489 Henry signed the Treaty of Redon with Anne’s council in an attempt to safeguard the independence of the Duchy.
15 However, distracted by the appearance of Perkin Warbeck in Ireland, he was unable to prevent Charles from divorcing his existing wife in order to marry Anne. That wedding took place on 6 December 1491. Meanwhile Henry had been seeking his remedies. A marriage between the 2-year-old Prince Arthur and the 3-year-old Catherine, Ferdinand’s
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youngest daughter, had been the subject of diplomatic exchanges since 1488, and the Treaty of Medina del Campo on the 28 March 1489 affected a formal agreement.
16 This has to be seen as part of the same strategy as the Treaty of Redon but it did not work against Charles, who simply shrugged off the threat. Eventually Henry made a gesture of war with France, and allowed himself to be bought off at Etaples in November 1492 without doing anything for the Bretons, but in securing the marriage agreement he had achieved the other of his two main objectives. The Trastamara were one of the most ancient and prestigious ruling houses in Europe and it was a great coup for Henry that they should be prepared to commit one of their daughters to his heir. Nevertheless for the time being nothing happened. This was partly because of the youth of both parties, and partly because of the trouble caused by Perkin Warbeck, who was active from 1492 until 1497. Ferdinand was understandably reluctant to commit his daughter to a realm that was threatened by a pretender. The marriage treaty was confi rmed on 1 October 1496, but still nothing happened. It was later alleged that Ferdinand made any formal ceremony conditional upon the execution of the Earl of Warwick, who appeared to be the catalyst for most of the trouble, but no contemporary evidence confi rms that. Instead the fi rst proxy marriage between Catherine and Arthur took place in May 1499, and the Treaty of Alliance was confi rmed two months later. 17 By that time Warbeck was in custody and the threat had all but disappeared. A further proxy ceremony took place in November 1500, by which time both Warwick and Warbeck had been executed. Catherine fi nally arrived in England in October 1501.Her dowry had been fi xed at 200,000 Spanish escudos (about £60,000), half of which was paid on her arrival. The other half was due at the time of her marriage but was never paid and remained as a bone of contention.
The celebrations that attended the fi nal and personal nuptials between Arthur and Catherine were protracted and elaborate. The City of London provided a costly allegorical spectacle – a series of pageants in six separate scenes – the fi rst of which, representing St Katherine and St Ursula, was set upon London Bridge. It is not known who devised these pageants, but knowing Elizabeth’s fondness for this kind of display it is probable that she played a part. The fi fth pageant represented the Temple of God, and was set at the Standard in Cheapside. It was there that the King and Queen took their stands, and witnessed the near blasphemous representation of Henry VII as God the Father and Arthur as God the Son. This noble King, says Prelacy (the presenter), has now ordained a marriage between his son and Katheryn, ‘the kyngys dowgthyr of Spayn’.
18 Flattery could hardly go further. The sequel, however, was tragic rather than romantic. Whether the marriage was ever consummated was later to be the subject of fi erce debate and 82
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the memories of those who had been close to the couple varied. The principal evidence for consummation came from Father Geraldini, her confessor. Arthur was 15 and she 17, so it is perfectly possible, but he seems to have been a feeble youth physically so Catherine’s later denials carry conviction. The hopeful couple were despatched to Ludlow in the Welsh Marches, the centre of Arthur’s jurisdiction as Prince of Wales, and there, on 2 April 1502, Arthur died. Both his parents were devastated; Henry by the loss of his heir and Elizabeth by the loss of her son. Edmund, their third son, had lived for only two weeks in the summer of 1500, so the dynasty now hung by the slender thread of Henry’s life. We are told that Elizabeth went, as her duty required, to comfort her husband in his loss but was so overcome by emotion that he had to comfort her
.19 The news, as Leland put it, had ‘smote her sorrowful to the heart’. Apparently she reassured him that she was still young enough to repair the loss and that turned out to be a fatal mistake. Edmund’s short life had not been a good omen, but the couple decided to try again, and by the autumn of the same year, Elizabeth was pregnant once more. On 2 February 1503 the Queen was delivered of a daughter in the Royal lodgings at the Tower. The child was named Catherine, after the widowed Princess of Wales, but she lived only a few days. Then, just over a week later, Elizabeth herself succumbed to puerperal fever and died on her 37th birthday. As Polydore Vergil wrote: ‘the queen herself died in childbirth. She was a woman of such character that it would have been hard to judge whether she displayed more of majesty and dignity in her life than of wisdom and moderation …’
20 There had been a great and perhaps unusual level of affection between the couple and Henry ‘privily departed into a solitary place and would no man should resort to him’.
21 Astrologers had assured him that she would live to be at least 80, but then astrologers had assured her mother before her birth that she would be a boy. The star gazers did not have a good success rate with Elizabeth. In due course her body was conveyed to Westminster and interred in the still-incomplete chapel, which was to be named after her husband. Her funeral was formal and elaborate as became her status and cost the princely sum of £2,800. Alone among the queens we have so far considered, Elizabeth died in her husband’s
lifetime, and was thus accorded the full honours due to the sovereign’s consort. Just over six years later Henry joined her in the same tomb, which was fi nally completed by his son, with the magnifi cent memorial by Torrigiano that still marks the spot. Although Elizabeth did not live to see them completed, negotiations were already far advanced for the marriage of her elder daughter Margaret at the time of her death. Relations with Scotland had been slowly improving since James III’s abortive invasion of 1487. James had died in 1488 and his young heir was anxious
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to come to terms. A commission was issued in June 1495 to negotiate a marriage between James IV and Margaret, then aged six. Elizabeth had acquiesced in this, but is alleged to have begged her husband not to surrender custody of the child until she had reached the minimum age for cohabitation, whic
h was 12.22 As it turned out, she need not have worried because James changed his mind and received the pretender Perkin Warbeck in November of the same year, with royal honours. It was only when James became disillusioned with Warbeck and abandoned him in July 1496 that the threads could be picked up again. Progress was again slow and it was not until July 1497 that fresh instructions were issued to Richard Fox, Lord Privy Seal and Bishop of Durham, who was Henry’s most experienced negotiator. The result was a series of short truces, culminating in the indefi nite Truce of Ayton in February 1498, but there was no renewal of the marriage negotiation at that stage. It was not until Warbeck had been executed in 1499, and a reassuring mission had gone from Spain to Scotland, that that subject could be raised again. A full peace treaty and marriage agreement was fi nally concluded on 24 January 1502, by which time Margaret was already 12.
23 The deaths, fi rst of Arthur and then of the Queen herself, put all these arrangements on hold, and it was not until August 1503 that the Princess fi nally travelled north to meet her future husband. If Elizabeth had entertained doubts about entrusting her eldest daughter to so remote a land, she was spared the need to see it happening. Meanwhile, Catherine was left in England without a husband and Henry without a wife. When the news of Arthur’s death reached him, Ferdinand immediately demanded the return of his daughter and the refund of the part of her dowry that he had already paid. This, it soon transpired, was a negotiating position and by September of the same year an agreement had been drafted to maintain the alliance by transferring the hand of the 17-year-old Catherine to the 11-year-old Henry junior. This new treaty was fi nally ratifi ed on 30 September
1503.24 It was realized that a papal dispensation would be necessary because of the degree of consanguinity created by Catherine’s fi rst marriage but no diffi culty seems to have been anticipated. The marriage was to be celebrated as soon as Henry reached his fourteenth birthday, that is on or after 28 June 1505. The papal bureaucracy fi nally ground out a dispensation at some point during the spring of that year, but by then Henry had changed his mind and caused his son to repudiate the agreement as soon as he had passed 14. By then circumstances had changed in Spain too, because Isabella of Castile died on 26 November 1504. Not only had Isabella been keener on Catherine’s second marriage than Ferdinand, she had also been Queen of Castile in her own right and although in her will she attempted to make Ferdinand Governor of the realm, her heir 84
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was not her husband but her elder daughter Joanna. Joanna was married to the Archduke Philip of the Netherlands and the mother of two promising sons, but many Castilian nobles did not fancy the alien Philip as King Consort, preferring the terms of Isabella’s will. A sharp political struggle then ensued, during which Philip and Joanna went to Spain and successfully asserted their rights. However in 1506 Philip died and Joanna (it was conveniently alleged) became deranged. This enabled Ferdinand to reassert himself as Regent, but it also meant that, if Joanna was deemed disqualifi ed the next heir to the throne was Catherine. She thus became one complication too many for her father who was quite happy for her to remain in England, marriage or no marriage. Poor Catherine, now aged 20, was thus left in limbo as Dowager Princess of Wales, without a role and with inadequate fi nancial support. Her endowment of one-third of the revenues of Wales had come to an end with Arthur’s death and Henry cancelled the replacement allowance of £1,200 a year when her betrothal to the new Prince of Wales was cancelled. Thereafter he made her only spasmodic payments, apparently as the spirit move
d him.25 Meanwhile, both the widowed kings were on the look out for new partners. Ferdinand took the opportunity to end his long-running feud with France and signed the treaty of Blois with Louis XII in October 1505, one of the conditions of which was that he should marry Louis’s niece, Germaine de Foix, and that wedding duly took place on 18 March 1506. This not only strengthened Ferdinand’s hand in Spain; it also distanced him from the King of England. There was never any question of hostilities, but relations cooled. Henry was less successful, and perhaps less determined. His fi rst target seems to have been the widowed Queen Joan of Naples, who was Ferdinand’s niece, and his envoys sent a very precise physical description of the lady from Valencia in J
une 1505.26 Ferdinand declared himself in favour of the proposal but nothing eventually came of it. However attractive Joan may have been, she would, it appears, have been no substitute for Elizabeth. Neighbouring princes were also keen to take advantage of the King’s availability. The Archduke Philip offered his sister Margaret, the widowed Duchess of Savoy, and a treaty was actually signed to effect that in 1506. Louis XII proffered his niece, Margaret of Angouleme. In the event it was the ladies themselves who declined the prospect but Henry’s pursuit was dutiful rather than enthusiastic. He was clearly more interested in using the negotiations for diplomatic purposes than he was in actually getting married again. It may have been a factor that his own health was in slow decline. The main purpose of marrying again would have been to strengthen his dynasty by begetting more children and it may well be that by about 1505 Henry was beginning to feel that that feat was beyond him. For whatever reason, he did not marry again and when he died in April 1509 he
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left an adult son (just) and a widowed daughter-in-law, both ready to start again. The rumours that he had at one time designs on Catherine himself appear to be without foundation and, knowing the King’s scrupulosity, are intrinsically improbable. His last matrimonial move was on behalf of his younger daughter, Mary, then aged 11. On 1 October 1508 he completed a treaty with Margaret of Savoy, his erstwhile intended and by then governor of the Netherlands, to wed her to Margaret’s eight-year-old charge, the Archduke Charles – later the Emperor Charles V – but once again the treaty proved abortive.
27 Of all the women we have so far considered, Elizabeth of York appears to have been the most gentle and the most conventional of queens. Despite the intrinsic strength of her political position, she never seems to have made the slightest attempt to exploit it and although her position as the heir of York is constantly alluded to there is never any suggestion that it threatened the King’s position. Her infl uence was nearly all behind the scenes. It should not be discounted for that reason but is extraordinarily diffi cult to assess. After her death one commentator described her as ‘one of the most gracious and best beloved princesses of the world’
28, while the Venetian ambassador called her ‘a very handsome woman, and in conduct very able’. She was an ideal helpmate, and also discharged her parental duty with notable success. In spite of the bitter disappointments of Edmund’s and Arthur’s deaths, she left two children who were to dominate the succeeding centuries: Henry VIII, the father of Mary and Elizabeth, and Margaret, the grandmother of Mary of Scotland and great grandmother of James VI and I. This page intentionally left blank
5
The Queen as Foreign Ally: Catherine of Aragon and
Anne of Cleves Catherine had come to England in 1501 as the pledge of an alliance bet
ween Henry VII and her father, Ferdinand of Aragon. The marriage that had sealed that alliance had lasted only a few months and, at the age of 17, Catherine had been left a widow. In order to maintain the alliance, and avoid repaying that part of her dowry that he had already received, Henry had then proposed and Ferdinand had agreed to betroth her to Arthur’s younger brother, Henry, a step for which a dispensation from consanguinity was required. At fi rst it had been suspected that Arthur had left his widow pregnant, but by the time that the dispensation was issued it was clear that that was not the case. It was, however, assumed that the union had been consummated, in spite of the protestations of her
duenna, Donna Elvira, and of Catherine herself, because it was the consummation rather than the ceremony of marriage that created the consanguinity. 1 The second marriage, however, had not taken place. The kings drifted apart and in June 1505, when the younger Henry reached his fourteenth birthday, his father caused him to repudiate the agreement. This should have been the signal for Catherine to go home but political circumstances in Castile made her presence in Spain unwelcome to her father, as we have seen, so she remained in England as the Dowager Princess of Wales. In 1507, when she was 22 and still unmarried, her father had accredited her as his ambassador in England, thus giving her a unique formal recognition. 2 It had been common in the past for royal consorts to act as de facto representatives of their families in England – but Catherine was not such a consort, and there was no precedent for an unmarried woman to act as an ambassador. Her role proved to be complex and exacting because Ferdinand’s remarriage had left him in alliance with France, a move that Henry had sought to counter by closer ties to the Habsburgs. It was for that reason that she found herself involved in a negotiation with Maximilian for a marriage between the King of England and her own sister Juana, the widow of King Phillip. The fact that Juana was alleged to be insane does not appear to have deterred either of the negotiators. It is not surprising that Catherine